At Hillsborough Baptist we are committed to providing a safe caring environment where children can grow in their relationship with Jesus and with each other.
We work at this in three main ways:
- We want our children to have a personal experience with God, so we have a great team who design and run programs high on worship, prayer, teaching of God’s word, fellowship, fun & games.
- We believe in the family as the place where spirituality grows so we are also passionate about doing all we can to help parents nurture their children’s faith too – we do this through the special programs we run, fun nights that involve the whole family and just getting alongside families with prayer, counseling and support in any way we can.
- We want our children to have a sense of belonging in our wider church family so we do all we can to make HBC a child-centered setting. One way we do this is by making the children part of our corporate worship times –sometimes things get a little “messy” …but that is half the fun.
Our Sunday programs: (at 10.30 am service and 10am combined service monthly):
As we are committed to a Bible-based curriculum which relates to the child’s life and experiences, our programs are designed to cater for varying levels of understanding for children from 6 months – 13 years.
We have programs for the “littlies” (0-5) upstairs in the pre-school on site and for the primary aged children downstairs. These programs are run by a team of parents, teachers, uni students and teenagers, with at least 4 people running the program. We emphasize caring relationships and ensuring the children are safe and happy.
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HBT (Hillsborough Baptist Tots)
HBT is for under 3s and is a lovely unstructured time, with a craft activity for the 2-3 years olds, music, stories, morning tea and plenty of play. We currently have an average of 10 children attending.
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HBJ (Hillsborough Baptist Juniors)
HBJ is for 3-school aged children and runs in a more structured way, with a weekly lesson and craft, music, stories, games and free activity. The current average number is 10.
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HBK (Hillsborough Baptist Kids)
HBK is a fully interactive program We use the Think Orange curriculum, and supplement it with other material as needed. 35 children is our current average number. We have lots of fun teaching, games and enjoy music as a group together and then we break into small (aged) groups to help them see how all the learning applies to their lives.
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Ignite
Our Ignite programme is run by a radically committed bunch of uni students who want to help our intermediate aged kids learn how to walk with God. At Ignite they get to experience for themselves the things God is speaking to them about. They have great worship, messages, games plus heaps of other things to encourage them to investigate who God is in they’re life.
Programs that happen outside Sundays:
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SOFA
SOFA runs weekly during school term from 6pm – 7.30pm and includes children in years 5-8. We start all together with a camp style dinner all together and rip into a high-energy, high impact program. SOFA has a strong emphasis on reaching children who don’t know God – at the moment we have between 40 and 50 children rocking up each Friday night – all from different backgrounds and ethnicities – it is such a picture of what we want our church to be.
Find out more about SOFA here.
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Family Fun Nights
We try to run these once a term – we send out an invite for kids to bring their mums and dads along and we have a pot-luck kind of picnic together with lots of games.
Other Resources